A newsletter and collection of information on Law and Business whose purpose is to bolster legal knowledge and incentivise exchange of information. No copyright infringement intended, I don't own any right to the pages linked in the posts.

1. The German Federal Court of Justice asked the ECJ to provide guidance on how cookie consent has to be obtained on a website in order to constitute a valid consent as well as which details the cookie policy must contain. E.g. does “surfing” a website constitutes valid consent? What details must a cookie policy contain.

2. The Federal Court of Justice ruled that a single consent of a consumer is enough to receive advertising via several channels (e. g. via @mail, telephone, SMS and MMS) Separate consents for each is not required. -Will this decision endure under the GDPR, which requires ‘granular’ consent under data protection law?-

3. The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt ruled that a sales contract for the acquisition of address data is null and void if the parties breach data protection laws whereas the individual’s consent wording did not clearly list the categories of personal data, recipients or purpose

4. The Regional Court of Berlin ruled that various default privacy settings of Facebook breach data protection law. (e.g. a location service in the app that reveals the location of the person that the user is chatting with, by default as well as pre-ticked boxes allowing search engines to link the user’s timeline). The court denied a valid consent since there was no guarantee that users knew that these boxes were ticked by default.

5. The Regional Labour Court of Berlin-Brandenburg ruled that an employee forwarding e-mails containing operational information to his private e-mail account in preparation for a new job with another employer (without the employer’s consent and without official necessity) can justify extraordinary termination of the employee’s employment contract for being a threat to the employer’s business interests.

Australian government agencies+businesses+non-profit organizations with a yearly turnover of US$2.3+ million, private-sector health service providers, and credit reporting bodies and providers now face a fine of US$330,000 for a serious or repeated interference with privacy, up to a maximum penalty of five times that, or US$1.65 million.

The tip suggests to politely address this form of communications (“Tell me how I should interpret your silence,”) while, by my experience, I can say that this can backfire, especially if the counterparty prefers to shy away or is strong on her/his position(s).

Golden management tip; giving a feedback is always tricky, especially because it can be subjective aka, there’s no clear black or white, but only shades of grey.

Therefore, a feedback should head towards giving suggestions, instead of assessing what’s right or wrong. Make sure you always specify that your feedback is an opinion (“(…) I (…)”, “(…) to me (…)” etc) and don’t just criticise.